Atauro - Pinnacle

General benthic features

The habitat these four frames show is patchy and encruster-dominated rather than a coral carpet. The widest frame is a reef top of dark maroon algal turf and framework with corals scattered across it: cream-tan massive lobate Porites heads, pale gray plating colonies, small pale corymbose and digitate colonies, a vivid red barrel-like sponge and a maroon sponge, patches of open sand behind, and an unusually high density of feather stars — a dozen or more crinoids across the foreground alone (e.g., Image 1).

1

A second wide frame is the sponge-and-foliose face of the site: several large pale-cream tightly convoluted foliose colonies, prominent dark gray finger and tube sponges with open oscula, brown tubular sponges, red, and purple encrusting sponges, pink-mauve encrusting corals, more crinoids, and a single small white patch that could be a bleached nubbin or a chip of dead skeleton — not resolvable from the photograph (e.g., Image 4).

4

The third frame is a large tiered plating colony in dark purple-gray with a distinctly beaded surface (Montipora-like), stacked in overlapping plates over sediment-dusted rubble, with a smoother lavender plate alongside and small hydroid tufts growing on it (e.g., Image 3).

3

The fourth is the most telling for cover: one solitary gray-green plate colony sitting on open, sediment-veneered hardground crusted with pink and red coralline algae, ringed by small blue damselfishes, with essentially no other living coral in frame (e.g., Image 2).

2

Coral cover

Coral cover: 20% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 53 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table. Nothing above is a cover estimate of ours from the photographs.

Stressors

No transect tape, mooring, gear, or other man-made object appears; no disease lesion or predation scar is visible.

Fish and other fauna

Dark chromis hang in the blue, with a yellow-tailed snapper- or grouper-like fish and a small butterflyfish over the reef.

Comparisons with other data

Also on record for this site: That average conceals real local variation: a substantial minority of the reviewed frames show dense, edge-to-edge coral cover — extensive massive Porites stands and branching Acropora thickets fill several frames outright — so "scattered" and "occasional branching growth" undersell the density in those pockets even though most of the site reads as open. Small fishes occur above the substrate, and the site still appears more open on average than Raiketa, Haruine, Inner Reef, or Cabbage Patch in the edited evidence. Paling is more widespread than a single frame: at least three separate colonies show conspicuous whitening across the reviewed selections — a branching soft coral reduced to little more than an olive-green core, a table Acropora with a distinct bleached patch, and a second table Acropora colony rendered pale white outright.

Dive record

Pinnacle was dived on 31 January 2024, in at 08:28 for 46 minutes, 35.7 m maximum and 16.8 m average depth, minimum water temperature 26.7°C (lifetime dive 255) — the deepest of the Atauro dives, and the frames look it: light is dim and blue-green rather than bright.